Pat Jaccoma appointed Farmer of the Year by the Middlesex County Board of Agriculture.
By: Paul Koepp
A local farmer with deep roots in the township’s rural past will be honored next month at the Middlesex County Fair.
Pat Jaccoma, of Pleasant Hill Farm on Ridge Road, has been selected as the Farmer of the Year by the Middlesex County Board of Agriculture.
Bob Von Thun Jr., president of the board, called Ms. Jaccoma a worthy nominee for the work she has done raising fruit and vegetables on the 100-acre family farm.
"She’s done a fantastic job over there," Mr. Von Thun said. "The family has been there for a long time."
Pausing under a shady tree for a brief break from a typical hard day’s work, Ms. Jaccoma said Tuesday that she learned everything she knows about farming from her father.
"He knew it all," she said. "He knew every kind of farming."
She recalled plucking the feathers of the chickens and turkey the family raised when she was a child. "That was a lot of work," she said.
Ms. Jaccoma said it has been a good year for the farm, except for a cold spell at the end of January, which followed a warm period that caused her fruit trees to start preparing to blossom too soon. The hardest work is still ahead, when harvest time arrives at the end of August, she said.
She grows fruit on about 20 acres of the farm, including apples, nectarines, plums, pears, peaches, watermelons, cantaloupes and tomatoes. Another 10 acres contain vegetables like peppers, cucumbers and squash. The rest of the farm is devoted to field crops like feed corn and soybeans, as well as empty fields and hay fields, she said.
However, Ms. Jaccoma may be better known for her flowers than for anything edible. Her special growing method yields geraniums much larger than normal, leading people to call her "The Geranium Lady."
"I grow them all winter and make cuttings with them, and then I put them in the 7-inch pots," she said, pointing to a row at the front of her farmhouse. She added that she can recognize them whenever she sees them around the township.
Ms. Jaccoma, a former substitute teacher in the South Brunswick school district, started the farm’s retail business with her parents in 1986, although she said the family had already been wholesaling its produce for years.
They also set up three 100-foot-long greenhouses that year. Ms. Jaccoma said the greenhouses have become especially hard to maintain as all the costs associated with farming have been driven up by the cost of fuel. To get by, she has to adopt new techniques.
She showed off a drip irrigation process in a field of tomatoes that is more efficient than the watering techniques she used previously, involving long rows of spraying devices.
"With those, you watered everything, including the weeds," she said. "This goes right to the root of my plants."
She said controlling the flow of water around her farm has become difficult as large warehouse complexes have been built in surrounding area, changing drainage patterns.
"It changes the way the water flows," she said, pointing out a 2-foot-deep ravine caused by flowing water in one field that she said could overturn the golf cart she uses to travel around the farm.
She said that while developers claim the addition of new warehouses has not altered the flow of storm water, "I really notice it’s different."
Ms. Jaccoma said she will continue to run the farm as long as she can. She makes some of the apple trees and a pumpkin patch available to the public for picking starting the last week of September.
She will be honored at the opening ceremonies of the county fair at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 6., which will be presided by Mayor Frank Gambatese. The fair will be held Aug. 6 to Aug. 12 at the fairgrounds at Cranbury and Fern roads in East Brunswick.

